If you live in a city street, chances are someone is digging it up, or is about to dig it up. Nationwide efforts to install optical fibre cables and replace Victorian water and sewerage have added to a regime of chaos that began when the utilities were privatised in the late 1980s.

Government, utilities and local authorities are now getting their act together to coordinate the 4m holes dug in the UK's streets every year. That's a lot of holes when you consider that there are just under 1m roads in England and Wales.

But the effort is being hampered by questions of information standards, ownership and secrecy - the very issues highlighted by Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign.

The first step in organising streetworks is to know what pipes and cables lie under each patch of tarmac. This is not a trivial exercise, Les Guest - of the national underground asset group - told the Association for Geographical Information's annual conference last week.

Today, data on streetworks is collected on seven or eight different scales, and organisations have widely differing ideas about when it should be made available.

"The data is of variable accuracy," Guest said "There are lots of incomplete records and a wide range of timescales on when it is made available, from 24 hours to more than three months." With some prodding from government, the underground assets group (nuag.org.uk) was set up last year to champion better coordination between utilities, highways author- ities, local councils and others.

Unmarked burials

Guest has called on government to enforce a statutory code of practice to force utilities and local authorities to make data on pipes and cables available on a common format, accurate to within 10cm (4in).

The code would also require people digging holes in the road to record details of "unidentified buried objects" - that is, the unmarked pipes and cables most likely to be damaged, requiring more holes to be dug in the road to fix them.

Standardised data accessible via a web browser would allow contractors to find out immediately what they are likely to hit, and alert them when two firms have plans to dig up the same street simultaneously or in quick succession. To be useful, this information would have to be available in real time. "At the moment, it's taking them months," Guest said.

This lack of mandatory standards threatens to compromise the government's attempt to reduce disruption through the 2004 Traffic Management Act, which gives highway authorities powers to regulate streetworks. Even though everyone agrees that a standard accessible electronic register of underground assets is a good idea, progress is slow. Standard formats and procedures won't be agreed until the end of next year, Guest said: "We're talking four to five years before it's all done."

What's the hold-up? Surprisingly, Guest says that commercial sensitivities among utilities are not a problem. A survey showed that most utilities didn't think there would be a problem, he said.

This has been the experience in Liverpool, where the city council is coordinating streetworks required by the regeneration effort.

Addressing the problem

Even official secrecy is not necessary, although a number of mysterious underground cables belong to the Ministry of Defence. "We wouldn't go public with their exact location, but we would shade an area of the map and say the MoD has got an interest there," says Guest.

Nor is technology. The government is sponsoring a project called Vista to create a 3D map of underground pipes and cables, which contractors will be able to check on a handheld device before they dig.

The problem is more the cost and complexity of moving to common data standards. The assets group notes: "There are likely to be cost and resource issues associated with the deployment of a new code." Maps and other geospatial data cost money, even when government has paid for them in the first place.

One complexity is the ongoing state of confusion about a national database of spatial addresses, a programme that has been in limbo for a year because of a dispute over who has the intellectual property in postal addresses.

These barriers are not insuperable. In Scotland, all 33 local authorities and 26 "statutory undertakers" already coordinate information on street works using the latest geographical information system technology.

The Scottish Road Works Register, funded by subscription, provides a "dial before you dig" service to coordinate work; its geographical information system, which flags up disruptions such as road closures, sporting events and skips as well as streetworks, will soon be available on the web, Mike Bartlett, of the software provider Symology, told the conference.

Technology Guardian's Free our Data campaign proposes a shortcut through at least some of the complexity. If electronic data collected by public bodies was automatically made available without worries aboutintellectual property, the job of coordination between public bodies, and the public and private sectors, would be simplified.

No one claims that freeing our data will overnight end the waste and disruption caused by Britain's road-digging frenzy. But any step towards a simpler life is surely worth a try.

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